Mila 18 - Leon Uris [2]
The German masses gave the edict in a terrifying redundance, “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!”
“Lebensraum [Land to live]!”
“Sieg Heil!
And they poised ready to act out the role of Teuton war gods to the strains of Wagnerian Fire Music.
“We must save German citizens living under foreign tyranny! A German is always a German!”
“Sieg Heil!”
Austria and Czechoslovakia qualified. Flushed with bloodless victories, certain that America, France, and England would not fight, the Nazi cancer spread.
“Danzig is German! Return the Polish Corridor! Return the 1914 borders! Halt the inhuman treatment of ethnic Germans!”
“Sieg Heil!”
Once an indifferent world stood by and shrugged as little yellow men fought little yellow men in a place called Manchuria, and once France sputtered feebly as Germany broke the Versailles Treaty and marched into the Rhineland, and once men debated, then sighed as black men in mud huts armed with spears fought for their land ... a name that children used in games ... Abyssinia.
A mesmerized world quivered at the proving ground of democratic sterility; the rape of Spain by Italian and Moroccan and German hordes.
Now Austria, now Czechoslovakia, and the righteous cowed and the evil grew bold.
Once the harbingers of peace told their people they had made a bill of peace in a place called Munich. As Poland’s hour grew near came that realization that there was no place left to run or to hide, nor words to say, nor treaties to make.
In Moscow, a shrewd chessplayer knew that the long dream of the Allies was to have Russia and Germany maul each other to death. His distrust of England and France was built upon decades of boycott, hard-learned lessons when republican Spain was abandoned, and finally when Russia was not invited to the sellout in Munich.
Hitler, positive of the final timidity of the Allies, positive their string of betrayals would extend to Poland, keyed his war trumpets to shattering highs and was responded to with black drum rolls and pounding boots.
Josef Stalin was no less certain of Allied betrayal. In a desperate bid for time he entered into negotiations with his archenemy. To ensure easy, unimpaired victory for himself, Hitler did business with Stalin, and the Allies cried, “Foul!”
And in the middle a proud and defiant Poland, which hated Russia and Germany with equal vigor, ended all hope of Allied unity by refusing to petition Russia for help.
Chris sped his Fiat down the rain-slickened boulevard and turned into the shop-lined New World Street. It was gray out. The late shoppers clung close to the building sand moved with haste past the elegant store windows. At the corner of Traugutta Street, where the line of shops ended, the New World Street changed its name to the Krakow Suburb Boulevard for reasons no one seemed to understand. Chris headed toward the semi-faded, semi-elegant Bristol Hotel. The hotel made a good newsman’s headquarters. It gave him a twenty-four-hour-a-day switchboard service and it stood at the apex of a triangle that enveloped the Europa Hotel, the Foreign Ministry, the President’s Palace, and Warsaw’s city hall. Between them, there was always a constant flood of news.
Chris turned the car over to the doorman and brushed past the turmoil of the rumor-filled lobby to the opened-cage Otis elevator of World War I vintage.
On the balcony floor he entered the door of a suite marked Swiss News Agency.
Ervin Rosenblum, photographer and journalist and Chris’s indispensable man, stood at the worktable, which was spilling over with photographs, cables, stories, and copy.
Chris walked beside him, wordless, and took a fistful of the late dispatches. One by one he let them flutter to the floor. Ervin Rosenblum was a very homely man who stood five feet five inches and was almost sightless without his thick-lens glasses. As Chris read, Ervin searched Chris’s pockets for a cigarette.
“Boy,” Chris mumbled. “They’re surer than hell going to start shooting soon.”
Ervin